Word: actor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Olmos' galvanizing portrayal only confirms what his fans have known for a long time: he is not only possibly the best Hispanic-American actor of his generation, but one of the best performers working today. His characters are fueled by a highly controlled intensity. Playing the teacher in Stand and Deliver or Lieut. Castillo in Miami Vice, he holds in his energy, radiating it through a laser-beam stare. He is every minority rebel putting his fireworks on a long fuse. In a few roles -- the strutting El Pachuco in Zoot Suit or the crazed, canine avenger in Wolfen -- Olmos...
Like his grandly obsessive contemporaries Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, Olmos is a demon for authenticity. To play Escalante, he altered himself physically, gaining 40 lbs. and enduring a tedious makeup process daily to create a balding pate over his thick hair. The actor also spent hundreds of hours studying Escalante's speech patterns on recorded tapes and observing the teacher's mannerisms and personal habits both during and after school hours. "He even wanted to move in with Jaime," recalls the movie's director, Ramon Menendez, "but Escalante's wife wouldn't allow...
...goals with extraordinary concentration. When major studios were reluctant to distribute 1982's The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, he boldly insisted until they caved in. "The odds were against us," recalls Cortez Director Robert Young. "But Eddie believed we could make it work, and we did." More recently, the actor has been negotiating with several major U.S. corporations to make copies of Stand and Deliver available to every library, school and boy's and girl's club in the country...
...night a young woman called Kaija Keel walked into Gazzarri's with a girlfriend who had dated Olmos. The daughter of Actor Howard Keel, Kaija (pronounced Ki-ya) had just ended a romance with her high school sweetheart, Actor Jeff Bridges. Olmos found himself drawn to Kaija's "frankness and tremendous sense of independence...
Eddie, a long-haired Chicano rocker, and Kaija, the daughter of a famous actor, had a hard job convincing both their families that they had a future together. "I was Guess Who's Coming to Dinner before the movie appeared," grins Olmos. "It was quite a dinner. They served artichokes, and I'd never eaten one." Even after the couple was married in a small ceremony in 1971, the Keels "weren't thrilled" by the union, says Kaija. "I was very mad at them for a while, but now that I'm a parent, I can understand. They were worried...